OStatic

I was never one for cryptozoological taxidermic creations -- you won't find mermonkeys or crocoducks on display in my home. I have, however, for the last few weeks, been hiding a jackalope in my laptop bag. He was an experimental little guy, but the folks at Canonical and the vast community behind Ubuntu have completed the necessary gene splicing and DNA alterations and soon -- very soon -- the final, stable release of Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) will be let loose into the wild.

What's new this time around? How does it all work? And for the wilder types, where locally can you attend a Jaunty Jackalope release party?

With all that goes on at conferences, it would seem that a white paper presentation would be, invariably, a pretty dry event -- with the document itself being even drier. While there are many topics in the Linux Foundation-sponsored IDC white paper, The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy (linked here as a PDF), and one might choose to quickly skim the research, data and projections, this report is really well worth taking a close look through.

Overall, IDC is a projecting a rosy future for Linux-related growth in the enterprise, with a compound annual growth rate of 23.6% for the 2008-2013 period. The overall market is projected to experience a 5% growth rate over that same time frame.

Last week, I had the pleasure of getting some unique insight into the Ubuntu 8.10 release ( Intrepid Ibex ) from Canonical's marketing manager, Gerry Carr. The finalized server and desktop editions of the 8.10 release will be available for download October 30th, and host a variety of new tools and features.